Page 10 of Elven Throne

Then she was at the outer limit of the vortex’s blazing white light, with no more time to watch the compound’s defenders who’d already been at this way too long.

All that mattered now was getting to the center of this blinding, staggeringly hot magical storm.

Now that she’d made it, Rebecca found herself with an entirely new obstacle.

She couldn’t see anything inside.

All around her, the streams of griybreki threw themselves at the churning column of light, one after another. They darted toward it in such quick succession, the frogmen looked more like one enormous single organism—an endlessly stretching snake winding its way toward the nexus of all this power amidst the battle.

Every gray-skinned creature barreling headlong into the storm instantly met its end. The larger ones were thrown away from the churning outer layer the second they touched it, launched backward across the battlefield only to be trampled beneath the unyielding webbed feet of their fellow frogmen. None of whom seemed to notice.

The smaller griybreki were incinerated on contact. Even the ashes of their instantly obliterated bodies disappeared beneath the surging heat of unstable energy.

Rebecca had no idea why the frogmen never stopped or drew back, but the time for solving such a mystery had long since passed.

The blinding white storm howled with violent intensity increasing by the second. Streaks of blazing lightning bolts erupted from the vortex’s center, seemingly at random, striking griybreki both nearby and farther out in the swarms.

Any of them touched by the bolts were pummeled to dust, as if that lightning now surged straight from the fucking sun…

Squinting against the glare, Rebecca fought for even the smallest glimpse of what lay at the storm’s center, but it was impossible.

She had to get closer.

Skewering griybreki with her Bloodshadow spear whenever they drew too close and tossing them aside amidst the continuing melee, Rebecca moved closer. Pushing herself through the first outer layer of searing heat and blinding light until she could no longer tell the difference between where she was and where she was going.

Then she had to close her eyes against the agonizing glare. The heat only intensified with every slow, determined step.

All her focus centered on moving forward, no matter what, until she realized how terrible the heat had become—how impossible to see anything around her now.

It was too much to bear.

Too much for anyone else, anyway.

The storm trembled with another devastating shudder. More lightning strikes blazed outward all around her, turning their griybreki targets to dust and narrowly missing Rebecca in the process.

Something told her they were random misses and not intentional. Whatever powers of luck and protection were on her side, though, wouldn’t last forever.

The earth trembled again beneath her boots, her entire world reduced to the glare of such intensely powerful magic burning its white light all around her. She couldn’t have oriented herself to retrace her steps and get out of here if it had occurred to her to do so.

Then the swirling debris swept up but not yet burned away by the magical storm cleared, like rain clouds blowing past the moon to reveal its light, and she received a brief, fleeting view through the whipping heat.

All the way to the vortex’s center.

There was someone in there. Someone instantly familiar despite how impossible it seemed.

By the Blood, it was Zida!

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Rebeccacouldn’tbelievewhatshe was seeing through the swirling shards of white light and the heat blistering her face and hands.

She certainly wouldn’t have expected Shade’shealerto be here, outside the compound, beyond what little safety its walls still provided. Let alone at the very center of this.

But now that she saw it, it couldn’t be unseen. Everything made sense.

This was Zida’s magic, burning through the night sky and the hundreds of griybreki that had already attempted to get as close as Rebecca stood now. Like Bor, Earl, and all the others left behind at Headquarters, Zida had emerged to join the fight. To do what had to be done. To protect their home, no matter how long it had been since the old daraku had diverted from her vows as a healer.

Now, she was single-handedly responsible for holding off the bulk of Eduardo’s siege.

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